Edited by

Sarah Dowling

Amy De'Ath

Poems by Richard Parker

My DPhil thesis dissertation is entitled From Utopia to Paradise: Louis Zukofsky and the Legacy of Ezra Pound and deals extensively with Pound and Zukofsky, particularly regarding their late oeuvres. Much of my first long poem/collection, from The Mountain of California …, was written as I finished my dissertation, and many locales, themes, and figures from that work are also included in my collection. Likewise, the collection was completed in California during a reading and consideration of the two West Coast–based generations of American avant-gardist poets who followed Pound and Zukofsky, many of whom can be read clearly in the work. The || caesura break things allow the subdivided long poem to be further subdivided, hopefully encouraging all of its constituent elements to exist in various different ways at once.

I am currently working on three associated projects: R.T.A. Parker’s 99 Sonnets about Evil and The Trav’ller and the Defence of Heaven, which are both near completion, and Æsthetic Theory, which is spezzato. The first is an extended meditation on the work of Herman Melville, most particularly the Christlike and disastrous undertakings of Pierre in Pierre. The Sonnets attempt to address such problems in the light of a cultural and moral (perhaps specifically British) milieu much changed since the mid-nineteenth century. The Trav’ller and the Defence of Heaven is a long narrative science fiction poem and Æsthetic Theory is an essay at an ecstatic aesthetic autobiography.

Sarah Dowling and Amy De'Ath have curated this feature devoted to the influence of North American poetry and poetics on English poetry, with work by Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson, Richard Parker, Holly Pester, Sophie Robinson, and Carol Watts that offers a range of perspectives on the intersections of Anglophone poetries.